I don't know much about how making money on youtube works, so here's my question. Is it more profitable for Arin to put out a couple videos everyday that get around 500,000 views, or for Jon to put out a couple a month that hit around 6-10 million?
It's tremendously in Jon's favor (AFAIK) because Game Grumps is fucking bloated.
Youtube ads are really hard to figure out, but on average per 1k views pay out ~$2 dollars. Let's use this as a baseline.
Let's just assume GG puts out 10 videos a week and they all get 500k views. Each video would generate $1,000 so that would be $14,000 on a week.
Let's also assume in that week Jontron puts out one video that gets 7 million. That single video would generate $14,000 that week.
Even right? But didn't I just say that it was extremely lopsided for JonTron?
It's because JonTron still seems to do all of his own stuff and is a one man act. That $14,000 he basically keeps outright.
Arin however has made Game Grumps into a "company" and as such employs a huge number of people. He has a cohost, a director of content, a financial advisor, an editor or two, and an animator all in house in a rented office space. That same $14,000 goes nowhere near as far.
Obviously there's more to the business dynamic with inserted advertisements, business deals, merchandise, etc. But generally speaking JonTron is in a much better place as he puts out high quality content less frequently and keeps all of the money.
This isn't to say that Arin has a bad gig, because he has to put in substantially less effort than Jon does. If Arin recorded 8 hours in a single day, his editor would chop that up into the 5 "Game Grumps" episodes a week and it would serve as content for approx. 2 months, 1 week, and 3 days - which is a ton. Obviously they edit parts down but it's very low effort and high return.
Arin could save tons of cash if he did the things that youtubers commonly do (don't rent an office for LPs, edited his own videos, not have your friends/wife on the payroll, etc) but he seems happier to spread the cash around for now, but I don't see how it's economically viable long-term for him. $14,000 a week sounds pretty high ($728,000 a year) but when you consider how many salaries are being drawn from that on top of the cost of running a business it doesn't seem like very much.
I hope that touring business is doing good, at least.